Kagan gets most out of Magyar set

Concertante explores Kodaly, Rozsa, Fekete

March 04, 2003|By John von Rhein, Tribune music critic.

It took a certain leap of imagination for Hilel Kagan, Concertante di Chicago's music director, to present an entire concert of Hungarian classical music without including a single work by Franz Liszt or Bela Bartok.

Settling for the obvious has never been Kagan's way. So he took his audience down a couple of unusual byways for "Magyar Forever," presented by his chamber orchestra Sunday in the DePaul University Concert Hall.

This latest installment of the ensemble's thematic explorations of various cultures' music linked two generations of Hungarian composers through their common fascination with folk song. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Zoltan Kodaly, Miklos Rozsa and Gyula Fekete were more absorbed in the essence and spirit of folk music than the real thing, since none of the pieces heard Sunday appeared to quote directly from Hungarian folk sources.

The program order showed how the indigenous musical influences waned with each succeeding generation. The newest work, Fekete's 1986 chamber opera "Roman Fever," sounded more like Puccini carried into the late 20th Century than anything specifically Hungarian.

As the conservative grandfather of modern Hungarian music, Kodaly was more firmly rooted in his native soil than even Bartok, and his early "Summer Evening" reflects this. It is fragrant music, full of delicate late-romantic atmosphere. The unforgiving acoustics exposed a thinness of upper string sound and some suspect intonation in the violins' highest passages.

Rozsa's "Theme and Variations" for violin and cello soloists (1966) is the middle movement, re-scored for chamber forces, of a Sinfonia Concertante the composer wrote for Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky. It's always good to hear the concert works of Rozsa, whose reputation in that realm has long suffered because of his half-century of service in the Hollywood vineyards. A songful lyricism predominates, capably captured by Concertante principal players David Volfe, violin, and William Cernota, cello. Kagan's flexible phrasing molded the orchestra around the soloists to achieve an unbroken line.

Fekete, 40, has strong ties to Chicago. He came to the city in 1991 to secure his master's degree from Roosevelt University and his doctorate from Northwestern University, where his teachers included Patricia Morehead and William Karlins. He now serves on the faculty of the Liszt Academy in Budapest. Sunday's program paired his piquant, folk-based "Czardas" (winningly played by principal clarinet Susan Warner) with the U.S. premiere of "Roman Fever," which he composed during his first two years in Chicago. Both works revealed a musical voice who deserves to be much better known.

Adapted from a short story of the same name by Edith Wharton, "Roman Fever" is a two-character lyric scene, roughly 30 minutes long, in which Alida Slade and Grace Ansley, both married and middle-age, dredge up old secrets as they sip tea and knit on a restaurant terrace in Rome in the 1920s. As it turns out, each woman was in love with the man Alida eventually married. The romantic chess game has a sly ending worthy of Henry James.

Fekete's score is drenched in a neo-romantic style that gives the two singers flights of compelling lyricism--arias, duets and arioso-like sections--over a seamless current of Pucciniesque melody in the orchestra that, for all its shimmering lushness, supports the singers and the English text admirably. The vocal writing is expertly crafted and beautiful, while Fekete's word-setting seems as natural as breathing.

I would have welcomed a bit of dissonant spice at key dramatic moments to relieve the prevailing sweetness. But I enjoyed "Roman Fever" a great deal, both as a piece and a performance. Sunday's singers--mezzo Julia Bentley (dripping honeyed venom in three-quarter time) and soprano Sharon Quattrin (radiant and clear)--were fully into their music and their characters, while Kagan and Concertante gave them model support. Fekete was on hand to share in the warm applause.